The Ammonite Violin & Others (10 page)

“Again? But I should think you’d have the damned thing memorized by now.”

I stop rubbing at my aching head and holdout my left hand to her.
Give it tome
, I say, and she narrows her grey eyes suspiciously, as I’ve never once before
asked
to see the stone, and it isn’t like me to deviate from the confines of the events and dialogue which she has scripted so meticulously. Possibly, she begins to suspect the unthinkable, rebellion from her wooden puppet, and must wonder if she’s allowed me too much string, too much slack upon my tethers. I half expect her to turn away again, to seek such refuge as might be had in the cracked dressing-table mirror, or to walk out the door and leave me alone in my dingy room. Instead, she nods her head and places the peculiar stone into my outstretched hand.

... and there would be no mention anywhere of her tiresome fairy stories or my deceitful, subjective desires.

I would reduce her to the driest of crystallographies.

The stone is not quite round and is somewhat flattened side to side, the approximate colour of licorice, and I tell her what I’ve already told her before, that it’s only a beach cobble, a bit of Mesozoic slate fallen from the headlands or the high cliffs surrounding the harbour, then polished smooth by time and the ocean. I describe its mineral composition for her—muscovite and quartz, with small quantities of biotite, pyrite, and hematite, and perhaps also traces of kaolin and tourmaline. But I have said repeatedly that it is a
peculiar
stone, have I not, and none of these things make it peculiar in the least. “What else?” she asks. A flurry of minute snowflakes escapes her lips, borne upon her voice and blown towards me on her Siberian breath, and they look nothing at all like fat white geese. “What is there about it that I
couldn’t
learn from the pages of one of your schoolbooks?” It grows so heavy in my hand then, her stone, as though it has suddenly trebled or quadrupled in size while appearing just exactly the same as always.
It is a sympathetic stone,
I say to her, surprising myself, and she takes a quick step backwards and bumps hard against a corner of the dressing table.
What?
I ask.
Did yon believe we’d never get this for?
But she only looks afraid and doesn’t answer me. And I understand now, at last, that the wizard’s daughter is as surely a puppet as am I. She is frozen to her core, kneeling in an alpine meadow, trapped forever in the icy shadow of an old man’s despite. It does not matter whether these things are literally true or only figurative. It does not matter, either, what I can and cannot believe, or whether I am sane.
A sympathetic stone
, I say again, and the snow from her lips settles in my hair and on the harsh angles of my face.
These markings scratched into its surface, I can’t read those, but I suspect that’s not important. It isn’t what we can see in this stone, but what this stone can see in us. Are you following me?
She licks her lips nervously, and they sparkle with the thinnest sheen of frozen saliva.
That’s its genius, you see. It truly is a looking glass.
She rubs at her hip where it struck the dressing table, and laughs the driest, most unconvincing laugh that I have ever heard. “You think me simple, an imbecile, is that it? Do you think you might gain the upper hand, and your freedom, too, with only a quickwitted riddle and a straight face? My father—”
But that was such a very long time ago,
I say, interrupting her.
long ago and far away, in a country I have never visited outside your dreams.

“One day, the old hobgoblin invented a mirror,” she says, and those cold auroral fires burn brightly in the twin voids of her pupils. Red, then blue, then green, and then back to red again; I can plainly hear them crackle in the sky above the boarding house on Gar Fish Street. “A mirror with this peculiarity—that every good thing reflected in its surface shrank away almost to nothing,”

I set the tin cup down upon my bed, and for the third time I say to her,
It is a sympathetic stone,
as I hive always heard there is magic contained within the number three. In my palm, the licorice-coloured cobble quivers and transforms into a crude sort of dagger. Many days or nights later, when these grim and fabulous events hive run their course and I have weighted her corpse with an anvil and a burlap bag filled with rusted horseshoes, I shall ponder the question of her relationship with the stone. Or the stone’s relationship with her. If, for instance, it is as Coleridge’s murdered albatross, some cross she has been condemned to bear in penance for all eternity, acting out this marionette performance down countless centuries. I will draw no conclusions to satisfy me, nor will I find any sense in any fraction of it, but, still, I will lay awake nights, turning the question over and over in my persistent, gin-addled mind. But I think, in contradiction to the evidence of her fear, the tremble in her snowy voice, the northern lights blazing in her eyes, that she was
glad
when we were done. Perhaps she was permitted some brief period of oblivion between one haunting and the next, and so I’d granted her exhausted spirit an interval of rest, a respite from the trails and horrors of her damnation. Without speaking another word, I rose from the bed and drove the stone dagger deep into her chest just beneath the sternum, then twisted it sharply up and to the right, that the blade might find and pierce her heart. Her lips parted, and a trickle of something dark, which was not blood, leaked from her mouth and spattered on my hand and the floor between us. In her grey eyes, the polar fires were extinguished, and she did not so much seem to tall at my feet as
flow
downward, as though her body had never been anything more substantial than water held forever but one degree below freezing. In my hand, the stone was only a stone again, still bearing those indecipherable runes or glyphs, the same ones I might have glimpsed, dreaming, carved into a granite menhir. And for the first time since she came to me, all those months ago, I felt warm, genuinely warm. But it is late, and the candle by which I have put down on paper these strange occurrences—being possibly nothing greater than a confession or the ramblings of a lunatic—has melted to little more than a puddle of beeswax and a guttering scrap of blackened wick. So I will not trouble myself with the details of how it was I removed her body from my room and the boarding house. However, I will add that I placed the peculiar,
sympathetic
stone inside her mouth, which was then sewn shut with a needle and thread I borrowed from the wife of my landlord. I told her simply that my socks had worn almost through and needed darning. I have considered leaving this place, before I am utterly bereft of even the price of a train ticket. I’ve looked at my maps and considered traveling north to Coos Bay, or inland to Salem or Pendleton. I might even go so far as Seattle. I have thought, too, that I might find gainful employment as a geologist in a mining camp. In the wild places, men are not so concerned with a woman’s indiscretions, or so I have been led to believe.

Beneath the low leaf-litter clouds, under endless dry monsoons of insect pupae, strangling rains of millipede droppings and noxious fungal spores, in this muddy, thin land pressed between soil and bedrock foundations, the fairie girl awakens in the bed of the Queen of Decay. She opens her violet eyes and sees, again, that it was not only some especially unpleasant dream or nightmare, her wild descent, her pell-mell tumble from light and day and stars and moonshine, down, down, down to this mouldering domain of shadow walls and knurly taproot obelisks. She is
here
, after all. She is
still
here, and slowly she sits up, pushing away those clammy spider-spun sheets that slip in and tangle themselves about her whenever she dares to sleep. And what, she thinks, is sleep, but admitting to myself this is no dream? Admitting that she has been snared and likely there will be no escape from out this unhappy, foetid chamber. Always she has been afraid of falling, deathly frightened of great heights and holes and wells and all the very deep places of the world. Always she has watched so carefully where fell her feet, and never was she one to climb trees or walls, not this cautious fairie girl. When her bolder sisters went to bathe where the brook grows slow and wide beneath drooping willow boughs, she would venture no farther in than the depth of her ankles. They laughed and taunted her with impromptu fictions of careless, drowning children and hungry snapping-turtle jaws and also an enormous catfish that might swallow up any careless fairie girl in a single lazy gulp of its bristling, barbeled lips.
And you only looked beneath a stone
, the Queen sneers, reminding her that she is never precisely alone here, that her thoughts are never only
her
thoughts.
Your own mother, she told you that your sisters were but wicked liars, and there was no monster catfish or snapping turtles waiting in the brook. But, she said, do not go turning over stones.
And the fairie girl would shut her violet eyes now, but knows too well she’d still hear that voice, which is like unto the splintering of granite by frost, the ceaseless tunneling noises of earthworms and moles, the crack of a goblin’s whip in air that has never once seen the sky.
Don’t yon go looking under stones,
the Queen says again and smiles to show off a hundred rusted-needle teeth.
In particular, said she—your poor, unheeded mother—beware the great flat stones that lie in the oldest groves, scabbed over with lichens and streaked with the glinting trails of slugs, the flat stones that smell of salamanders and moss, for these are sometimes doorways, child.
The Queen laughs, and her laughter is so terrible that the fairie girl cringes and
does
close her eyes.
Disobedient urchin, you knew better.
“I was following the green lizard,” she whispers, as though this might be some saving defence or extenuation, as if the Queen of Decay has not already heard it from her countless times before. “The green lizard crawled beneath the stone—”—
which you knew damn well not to lift and look beneath. So, here now. Stop your whimpering. You were warned; you knew better.
“I wanted only to find the lizard again. I never meant to—”
You only came knocking at my door, dear sweet thing. I only answered and showed you in. You’d have done well not to entrust your well-being to a fascination with such lowly, squamous things—serpents and lizards and the dirty, clutching feet of birds.
The fairie girl opens her eyes again, trying not to cry, because she almost always cries, and her tears and sobs so delight the Queen. She sees herself staring back with watery sapphire eyes, reflected in the many mirrors hanging from these filthy Avails, mirrors which her captor ordered hung all about the chamber so that the girl might also witness the stages of her gradual dissolution. The fracturing and wearing away of her glamour, even as water etches at the most indurate stone. Her eyes have not yet lost their colour, but they have lost their inner light. In the main, her skin is still the uncorrupted white of fresh milk caught inside a milkmaid’s pail, but there are ugly, parchment splotches that hive begun to spread across her face and arms and chest. And her hair, once so full and luminous, has grown flat and devoid of lustre, without the sympathetic light of sun or moon, wilting even as her soul wilts. She is drinking me, the girl thinks, and,
Yes
, the Queen replies.
I have poured you into my silver cup, and I am drinking you down, mouthful by mouthful. You have a disagreeable taste upon my tongue, but it is a sacred duty, to consume anything so frail as you. I choke you down, lest your treacle and the radiance of you should spread and spoil the murk
. And all around them the walls, wherever there are not mirrors, twitch and titter, and fat trolls and raw-boned redcaps with phosphorescent skins and hungry, bulging eyes watch the depredations of their queen. This is rare sport, and the Queen is not so miserly or selfish that she will not share the spectacle with her subjects.
See,
she says,
but do not touch. Her flesh is deadly as cold iron to the likes of us. I done have the strength to lay my hands upon so foul a being and live.
In the mirrors hung on bits of root and bone and the fishhook mandibles of beetles, the fairie girl sits on the black: bed far below the forest floor, and the Queen of Decay moves across her like an eclipse of the sun.
Do not go looking under stones, your poor mother said. I have heard from the pill bugs and termites that she is a wise woman. You’d have done well to heed her good advices.
It is hard for the girl to
see
the Queen, for she is mostly fashioned of some viscous, shapeless substance that is not quite flesh, but always there is the dim impression of leathery wings, as if from some immense bat, and wherever the Queen brushes against the girl, there is the sensation of touching, or being touched by, matted fur and the blasted bark of dying, lightning-struck trees. The day she chased the quick green lizard through the forest, she was still whole, her maidenhead unbroken, the task of her deflowering promised—before her birth—to a nobleman, an elfin duke who held his court on the shores of a sparkling lake and was long owed a considerable debt by her father. The marriage would settle that account. Would
have
settled that account, for the Queen took the fairie girl’s virginity almost at once.
We’ll have none of that here,
she said, slipping a sickle thumb between the girl’s pale thighs and pricking at her sex. Only as much pain as she’d always expected, and hardly any blood, but the certain knowledge, too, that she had been undone, ruined, despoiled, and if ever she found some secret stairway leading up and out of the Queen’s thin lands, her escape would only bring shame to her family.
Better a daughter lost and dead and picked clean by the ants and crows,
the Queen of Decay told her,
than one who’s given herself to me, who’s soiled my bedclothes with her body’s juices and played my demimoniaine.
“Nothing was given,” replied the fairie girl, and how long ago
was
that? A month? A season? Only a single night? There is no time in the land of the Queen of Decay. There is no
need
of time when despair would serve so well as the past and all possible futures. Mark it all the present and be done.
What next?
the Queen asks, mocking the laws of her own timeless realm.
Have you been lying here, child, asking yourself, what is next in store for me
? “No,” said the girl, refusing to admit the truth aloud, even if the Queen could hear it perfectly well unspoken. “I do not dwell on it,” the girl lies. “You will do as you will, and neither my fear nor anticipation will stay your hand or teach you mercy.” And then the Queen swelled and rose up around her like a glistening, alveolate wreath of ink and sealing wax, and the spectators clinging to the walls or looking out from their nooks and corners held their breath, collectively not breathing as though in that moment they had become a single beast divided into many bodies.
I only followed the lizard,
the fairie girl thinks, trying not to hear the wet and stretching noises leaking from the Queen’s distorted form, trying not to think what will happen one second later, or two seconds after that.
It was so pretty in the morning sun. Its scales were a rainbow fashioned all of shades of green, a thousand shades of green,
and she bows her head and strains to recall the living warmth of sunlight on her face.
Show me your eyes, child,
growls the Queen of Decay.
We will not do this thing halfway.
And, reminded now of details she’d misplaced, the girl replies, “
Its
eyes were like faraway red stars twinkling in its skull. I’d never before seen such a lizard—verdant, iridian, gazing out at me with crimson eyes.” The moldy air trapped within the chamber seems to shudder then, and the encircling mesh that the Unseelie queen has made of herself draws tighter about the girl from the bright lands that are ever crushing down upon those who must dwell below.
I have not taken everything,
she says.
Not yet. We’ve hardly begun,
and the fairie girl remembers that she is not chasing a green lizard with red eyes on a summer’s morning, that she has finally fallen into that abyss—the razor jaws of a granddaddy snapping turtle half buried in silt and waterlogged poplar leaves, or the gullet of a catfish that has waited long years in the mud and gloom to make a meal of her. There is always farther to fall. This pool has no bottom. She will sink until she at last forgets herself, and still she will goon sinking. She glances up into the void that the Queen of Decay has not bothered to cover with a mask, and something which has hidden itself under the black bed begins to snicker loudly.
You are mine, daughter
, says the Queen.
And a daughter of loam and toadstools should not go about so gaudily attired. It is indecent
, and, with that, her claws move swiftly and snip away the girl’s beautiful dragonfly wings. They slip from off her shoulder, falling from ragged stumps to lie dead upon the spider sheets. “My wings,” the girl whispers, unsurprised and yet also disbelieving, this new violation and its attendant hurt seeming hardly more real than the bad dreams she woke from some short time ago (if there
were
time here). “You’ve taken my wings from me,” and she reaches for them, meaning to hide them away beneath a pillow or within the folds of her stained and tattered shift before any greater harm is done to those delicate, papery mosaics. But the Queen, of course, knows the girl’s will and is far faster than she; the amputated wings are snatched up by clicking, chitinous appendages which sprout suddenly from this or that dank and fleshy recess, then ferried quickly to the sucking void where a face should be. The Queen of Decay devours the fairie girl’s wings in an instant, less than half an instant. And there below the leaf-litter clouds and the rustling, grub-haunted roof of this thin, thin world, the Queen, unsated, draws tight the quivering folds of her honeycomb skin and falls upon the screaming, stolen child...